In the News

Much of the news entails suffering. It often contains stories of human suffering, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. I, in turn, often suffer or get disturbed when I read the news. I remain offended and saddened by the actions of my country that is built on high principles.

Feminist playwrite and activist Eve Ensler has been suffering from Uterine Cancer--from the disease itself, from the treatment, and from infection from the treatment. However, she says she has mostly been suffering from what the women, girls, and even babies are experiencing in Democratic Republic of the Congo--rapes as a weapon of war and the related horrors resulting thereof. She has visited the country and its women who have experienced the atrocities.

In a writing for the UK Guardian, Ensler deduced:

The atrocities committed against the people of Congo are not arbitrary, like my cancer. They are systematic, strategic and intentional. At the root is a madly greedy world economy, desperate for more minerals robbed from the indigenous Congolese. Sourcing this insatiable hunger are multinational corporations who benefit from these minerals and are willing to turn their backs on the players committing femicide and genocide, as long as their financial needs are met.

I am very concerned about this supposedly $1 trillion dollar mineral find in Afghanistan. Now the women of Afghanistan have already suffered much and are treated horribly, but this is not exactly what I am worried about here, although that in turn might foster hash treatment of the women. What I am specifically worried about is this being used as a further excuse for US occupation and domination of that country. In fact, there is an article at The Christian Science Monitor that puts it in just those terms. Staff writer Ben Arnoldy writes, "Many Afghans I have spoken with believe firmly that America wants to permanently occupy the country in order to take Afghan land and resources."

I have also been sorry about the pressured resignation of longtime journalist and White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, surrounding her impromptu remarks regarding Israel. CODEPINK wrote in a piece on Alternet:

It is a shame that Ms. Thomas’s career came to a screeching halt because of a comment that she has apologized profusely for.  There’s no excuse for Ms. Thomas’s remark; we take her apology seriously; and we still have a tremendous respect for her long, productive career, her daring challenges to presidents and their spokespeople, and her opposition to US wars.

I note that Helen Thomas has been as much a truth-telling woman of this country as Malalai Joya has been for Afghanistan. She has told it like it is and asked the hard questions. Ralph Nader has a piece in Common Dreams concerning Thomas in which he writes:

In 2006 when George W. Bush finally called on her, she started her questioning by saying "Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of Americans and Iraqis. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true." Or when she challenged President Obama last month, asking "When are you going to get out of Afghanistan? Why are we continuing to kill and die there? What is the real excuse?"

On March 13 of 2009, Thomas published a piece questioning our need and reasons for being in Afghanistan. She ended that piece by saying, "Sooner or later American presidents should learn that people will always fight for their country against a foreign invader. "And," she continued, "peace should be the only goal." On December 6, 2009, she published a piece comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam.

Nader wrote that what happened to Thomas was a result of "two pro-Israel war hawks" and also wrote of others standing up in her defense, including a group called, "Jews for Helen Thomas."

Helen Thomas, a native of Winchester, KY, is an Arab-American who grew up in Detroit, MI. This past Sunday, columnist Larry Webster of Eastern KY published in the Lexington Herald-Leader one of his great pieces entitled, "Come home, Helen, there's plenty to do."

Full of local references and need for truth-telling, Webster also wrote:

You can come back to Kentucky, Helen, as long as you are willing for the foreign policy of the United States to be based on a theory that is roughly this: Several thousand years ago, a man over 100 years old and a woman over 90 had a baby which God swapped some land for.



And that was not just any god but the main one, and unless we help that baby's people take that land away from its rightful owners, Jesus cannot return again, or there won't be the Rapture, or some eternal consequence that's hard to remember and some denominations are just plain wrong about.


Maybe if Helen came back to the hills, some feuding family will block the mouth of the holler to keep their enemy from going to the store, cut down their fruit trees, steal their water, tear down their houses and walk among them with guns. She might be offended by that kind of stuff, but we hope she will have sense enough not to say anything about it.